Fear isn’t an
emotion we usually associate with Easter.
We think of Easter and we think of joy, celebration, and triumph. But before there were any of those things
there was fear. Two men in dazzling
clothes suddenly appeared to the women in the tomb, and they were
terrified. They bowed their faces to the
ground and just stood there. Like death
itself, fear brings things to a halt. It
stops us in our tracks. The great
preacher Fred Craddock has captured the paralyzing power of fear:

“Why don’t you go
out for the ball team?” “I’m afraid I
won’t make it.”

“Why don’t you try out for the school
play?” “I’m afraid I won’t get a part.”

On that Sunday morning just outside
Jerusalem the women’s worst fears had already come true. The master was dead. Were these strange men going to continue the
horror and sweep them up in death too? They just stood there, stuck,
immobilized by fear.

Then the men spoke to them. They gave
them the antidote to fear: “Remember,” they told the women. “Remember how he told you while he was still
in Galilee.” Memory is the antidote to
fear.

I was watching one of the NCAA
Tournament basketball games, and just before tip off the cameras took us inside
the dressing room of one of the teams. The coach was giving his final talk to
the team before they took to the floor. You could see the tension on the faces
of the young men. Everything they’d been working for all season was on the
line, in front of millions of people. They had a lot to lose. The coach told
them to remember who they were. He recalled for them the victories they’d won,
the teamwork they’d achieved. They remembered, and when they went out, they
played like they weren’t afraid of anything.

The women stood there in the empty
tomb motionless, with their heads bowed to the ground, and the angels told
them, “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of
Man must be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day rise
again.” And they remembered, and they
went out to tell the world.

You can understand why the women had
to be reminded of what Jesus said to them in Galilee. He told the disciples that “he must go to
Jerusalem and undergo great suffering… and be killed, and on the third day be
raised…” It didn’t fit into the story they had constructed in their minds, the
story of Jesus as the one who is above such things. Peter pulled him aside and
rebuked him for such talk. Jesus
suffer? Be killed? That’s a thought you just want to put out of
your mind. It is one of those things you
don’t want to remember. It’s too
frightening to think about.

It’s funny how memory works, how
selective it is. Something happens or someone says something, and you don’t
notice or you put it out of our mind. Then later something triggers that
memory, and an encounter or an event that had lain dormant for a long time
rises up and shapes your life. There’s so much Jesus tells us we don’t remember
until later. So much of what he’s
promised that we don’t even notice until the promises are fulfilled. Faith often works like that.

The author Dan Wakefield tells how
memory led him back to church. A number of years ago he was stuck. He had just
ended a seven-year relationship with a woman, buried both his parents, gone
broke, and moved across the country to Boston to start a new job. He was mired
in chaos. Then one day he grabbed an old Bible from one of his piles of books
and with a desperate instinct turned to the 23rd Psalm. In the
months that followed, he recited it in his mind. It didn’t lead him back to his
childhood belief in God, but it did give a sense of peace and calm.

One evening, just before Christmas,
he was sitting in a neighborhood bar on Beacon Hill when a housepainter named
Tony said out of the blue that he wanted to find a place to go to church on
Christmas Eve. Wakefield didn’t say anything, but a thought flashed in his
mind, “I’d like to do that too.”

He hadn’t been to church since he
left home for college 25 years before, but on that Christmas Eve he found
himself in King’s Chapel, which he selected from the ads in The Boston Globe
religious page because it seemed less threatening. He assumed “Candlelight
Service” meant nothing more religiously challenging than singing some carols.

He didn’t go back again until Easter,
but after that he wanted to go again. And that presented a challenge. His two
initial visits had been on holidays, when “regular” people went to church. But
to go back again meant he’d have to cross Boston Common on a non-holiday Sunday
morning, and be seen going into the church. He tried to be as inconspicuous as
possible, hoping his friends would all be home doing brunch and the Sunday
papers so he wouldn’t be caught in the act.

To his surprise, he recognized people
he knew. He just assumed he didn’t know people who went to church, yet there
they were, intellects intact, worshiping God. Once inside he understood why. He
found relief connecting with the age-old rituals, reciting psalms and singing
hymns. He was reminded that there’s something beyond his own flimsy physical
presence, a God and a community. Wakefield joined the church, started attending
a Bible study and teaching Sunday school, and began a spiritual journey that
reoriented his life.[2]

Sometimes a parent whose child has
grown up and left home will lament to me that her son or daughter doesn’t go to
church. “We brought him up coming every
Sunday, and now he won’t have anything to do with it.” I remind those parents that a seed was
planted and memories were made. One day,
maybe an Easter Sunday, when he remembers singing the hymns, the warmth of the
congregation, the love and the peace in the prayers, he’ll walk into a
sanctuary like Dan Wakefield did and he’ll remember what he already knows. He’ll remember what he learned in Sunday
school, those conversations with his youth advisor, what you taught him around
the dinner table. Sometimes those
memories come and they roll away the stones that keep us from entering those
holy places where we encounter what God has done.

I’ve always assumed the stone was
moved from Jesus’ tomb so Jesus could get out.
But it dawned on me while preparing this sermon that Jesus didn’t need
to have the stone moved. His resurrection
body could pass through walls. The stone
wasn’t moved so Jesus could get out. It
was rolled away so the women could see in.
And once the women were in, the angels told them to remember, and memory
rolled away the stone of their fear that paralyzed them, and they understood
who Jesus was.

Those memories of Jesus, our
encounters with him in worship and prayer, the way he’s lifted us out of
despair, given us direction, calmed our troubled spirits, those are the deepest
and most lasting memories we have. They
are embedded in the very depths of our souls.
I’ve occasionally led worship in nursing homes where a large portion of
the congregation suffer from dementia.
Some of those men and women can no longer remember the names of their
own family members, but when we sing a favorite hymn or say the Lord’s Prayer
or recite the Apostles’ Creed, they remember every word. Those memories, like the God they proclaim,
are lasting and endure the ravages of the years.

Many of us are afraid for the church
these days. We remember a time when the Protestant Church in America had more
influence, when Sunday mornings were for church, not soccer practice, when
Wednesday evenings were for Bible study, and when the congregations of Donegal
Presbytery had more than twice as many members as they do today. Dan Aleshire, retired
Executive Director of the Association of Theological Schools, has pointed out
how sometimes our memories can be misleading. When the Hebrews were wandering
in the wilderness for 40 years they looked back longingly on the time they were
slaves in Egypt and had enough to eat, plenty to drink, and roofs over their
heads. Whenever they wanted to go back to Egypt, their leader Moses had to
remind them of the promise God had given them that they would have a land of
their own. It would be different from Egypt, but better. When the Hebrews
doubted that promise, Moses reminded them of God’s faithfulness to their
ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, how God really did deliver on the promise
to make them a great nation in spite of insurmountable odds.

These days the odds against the
church sometimes seem insurmountable. This is when we have to remember what
Jesus said to us, what he’s promised. There was an article in the paper about
two new Protestant churches that were being built on the outskirts of Beijing,
China. Each will accommodate 1500
worshipers. They were being built
because the existing Protestant churches in the city couldn’t accommodate
everyone who wants to worship. In 1950,
the year after the Communists took over, there were 4000 Protestants in
Beijing. For the next generation
Christians all over the world feared that the gospel was a lost cause in Red
China. We feared that all the hard work
and sacrifice of the missionaries was useless.
During Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s Christians were
beaten and sometimes killed, and churches were turned into museums. But now there are over 100 million Christians
in China. The church is stronger now than when the Communists took over. Jesus was never forgotten in China. People remembered the good news of the risen
Christ. And God remembered.

Remembering what Jesus has done,
remembering his words of life, gives us hope and courage because we know that
he will be as faithful to us in the future as he has been in the past. But what
if you have no memories to call on ? What if there’s nothing in your experience
to draw from? Then you share the memories that the church holds on our behalf,
the faithfulness that is proclaimed in the scriptures and the witness of
Christians through the ages. Christ joins us with his church and its memories
of God’s faithfulness to Abraham and Moses and David and the apostles. Those
memories of God’s people through the ages become our memories. And if the memories
we have fail us, we know that God’s memory never fails. God remembers us in
life and in death.